Parabola's Spring 1983 issue: Guilt We most often think of guilt in terms of something we have done, but this does not explain the feeling of responsibility for an unknown something we are not doing, the instinctive sense that we are avoiding something. In her article, Dorothea Matthews locates the source of this in the very structure of the human organism. Unlike every other, we are "unfinished creatures," born, she says, "with essential connections lacking, essential functions undeveloped. We know this is so, for example, when we apprehend for a moment the completeness of an animal and envy the integrity and natural dignity of its perfect relationship with itself and its surroundings. This moment can also bring a taste of our own hypocrisy and falsity, generally so disturbing that we turn aside from it as quickly as possible. We do not see this moment as one of opportunity, one which could motivate the movement toward the authenticity we feel the lack of so strongly. There is something "wrong" with us, but as Matthews points out, there would be little hope for us if there wasn't. Without this "fault," man would nothave "the privileged task which all the great religions allot to him, as the only being who can participate with his Creator in the making of himself." --from the editorial Focus Cover: Statue of Ranhofer, Prophet of Ptah and Sokari Dynasty V In this issue:

• "A Flash of Living Fire" by Dorothea Matthews
  - Conscience as a key to human possibility
• "Original Sin" by Vincent Rossi
  - Plot for a cosmology
• "Walking the Maze at Chartres" by P. L. Travers
  - The way in, the way out
• Arcs: "Metanoia"
  - The many voices of conscience
• "Repentance" by Adin Steinsaltz
  - The upward spiral
• "The Search for Lucidity: An interview with Michel de Salzmann"
  - Reorienting the energy of the ego
• "Long Shadow" by John Updike
  - A poem
• "The Gift of Lack" by Robert Granat
  - Messages from the interior: an experimental report
• "Suffering" by Helen Luke
  - The consequences of evasion
• "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" by Thomas A. Dooling
  - The retreat from culpability in the courts

Tangents - Reviews

• "Inaugural Lines" by John Anthony West
  - Sacred geometry at St. John the Divine
• "Psalms in Canon" by Linda Sanders
  - Steve Reich's "Tehillim"
• "Animation, Animals, and Animism" by David Abram
  - "The Secret of NIMH"

Epicycles - Traditional stories from around the world

• "Mother Hildegarde" from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle
• "Green Willow" / Japanese retold by Paul Jordan-Smith
• "The Judgment of Mahpiyato" / Lakota (Native American) retold by Paul Jordan-Smith